Tuesday, January 25. 2011

This site's bibliography section lists and comments all the relevant books about Chuck Berry and his work.
One of the books discussed is Rich Cohen's history of Chess Records called Machers and Rockers. As you can see, I found this book hard to read and full of errors. My recommendation was not to spend any money on it.
I recently learned that Cohen wrote a second book on the same topic. The title is "The Record Men: The Chess Brothers and the Birth of Rock & Roll". It have not been able to find out when it was released but I hoped he had taken the opportunity to correct all the flaws in his first book.
So I recently ordered this second book only to find that I became victim of a rip-off, unfortunately common among book publishers nowadays.
"The Record Men" is NOT a second Rich Cohen book! It is just the paperback edition of "Machers and Rockers" retitled. They have not changed a single word other than the page headers. Nowhere it tells that it's a reprint except for the Library of Congress Catalog entry. They even falsified the Larry King quote on the cover (unless King praised both books with the same words).
I did not recommend the hardcover edition, but I strongly discourage you to even look at this rip-off reprint.

Thursday, January 6. 2011

When I first wrote about the new series of 16 Chuck Berry album replicas issued by Universal Music Japan, I complained that I do not understand why they do not offer hard, rigid boxes with the Mini-LPs to keep them safe.
I'm not alone as I learned. For some reason, Japanese album replicas are always sold in paper sleeves only. Only in rare circumstances a CD manufacturer will put several albums of a series in a box, though these then do not sell separately.
However, there's a market for Mini-LP boxes. To put the albums in a safe place, some companies offer blank boxes to carry a certain number of Mini-LPs. Here's one offer: Blank Mini-LP Boxes
And then there is a huge Japanese record shop chain called Disk Union. They sell many Mini-LPs and they want you to buy all of a series, not just the few you really want. Therefore Disk Union often produces promotional boxes which not only are huge enough to hold the whole series, but also are printed with information about the series or with the cover of one of the albums contained. For the Chuck Berry series Disk Union has produced two different boxes, one to hold the first eight albums, a second to hold the remaining eight Mini-LPs. These boxes are NOT sold separately. The only way to get them is to purchase the complete set of albums with it. And these boxes are not shipped by Disk Union to buyers outside Japan.
I have not been able to get the boxes from Disk Union or even a good photo thereof, although they were very responsive to my queries. However, thanks to Douglas Caldwell and Tiger Mountain Music I am able to show good photos of the boxes. Tiger Mountain Music imports the Disk Union sets from Japan and resells them from Canada. If you are interested in buying the boxes (and the included albums), check out their eBay store at Tiger-Mountain-Music.

These photos are copyrighted by Tiger Mountain Music and used here with permission. Click on the images to see the box in detail.
Here's a link to an offer of the two boxes by Tiger Mountain Music: click
For more information about Mini-LP boxes in general, visit the minilps.net site.